Citation

von Pidoll U, Kramer H. Fire Safety J. 1997; 29(1): 27-39.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1997, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Mainly in the car industry, many automatic electrostatic spraying installations are at present being converted to use water-based paints. This will involve considerable advantages in the field of fire and explosion protection, if the water-based paints used can be considered non flammable when sprayed. To investigate this question, the burning behaviour of more than 120 electrostatically sprayed water-based paints, which consist of flammable resins and possibly flammable pigments suspended in mixtures of flammable water-soluble organic solvents and water, was tested under practical conditions. Investigations on flushing liquids were also included. The paints were sprayed using high rotation bell-type sprayers. While the majority of commercially available water-based paints proved to be non-flammable when sprayed, a number of paints turned out to be flammable. Recipe ranges are stated in the form of an easy numerical equation which delimits the different burning behaviours. It was found, that the flammability limit of the multiphase paint system is simply related to the flammability limits of its binary subsystems water/combustible solids and water/combustible liquids in an additive manner.